For all intents and purposes the 2000 school year is over. The secondary schools have shut their gates and primaries will this week and next go through the December rituals of break-ups, prizegivings and farewells. Public examinations are in the distant past; results are just a few short weeks away. The standards of our students and their schools have been put to the test on a national basis and our progress, if any, towards excellence and creating the knowledge economy will be measured, for all to see. The Class of 2000 will know how well or poorly it has done.
Soon - too soon - however, the remaining pillars of a merit-based, competitive and truly national secondary education system are to be removed.
The very names School Certificate and Bursary will, between 2002 and 2004, join their long-lost cousin University Entrance as education museum pieces. The paramountcy of external public examinations is ending and a more complex measurement system, at a lower common denominator, is being imposed.
Students, parents, educators and employers will find this new hybrid, the National Certificate of Educational Achievement (NCEA), is part-examination and a substantial element of localised, variable and negotiable internal assessment. The NCEA was to have started from next year but was postponed because the school system was deemed by the education minister to be unprepared. It would seem a fair bet that the country as a whole would not have been, and is not, prepared for these changes either.
It may be argued that external examinations have their flaws. Prime among them is the discredited system of scaling to pass or fail an agreed percentage of students. Proponents of the NCEA label examinations "memory and stress tests." Yet the inevitable extension of internal assessment is of much greater concern. Under the NCEA, individual schools, not a central ministry or authority, will have the major responsibility for setting their own standards for internal assessment. The concept is fraught with risk: for example, the Qualifications Authority is already circulating strategies to schools for "authenticating" that pupils actually do the submitted work themselves and do not, say, download it from the internet.
At the fifth form level, up to half of the pupil's result will come from whatever formula his or her school has constructed, with the benefit of national guidelines, for its teachers to use. Our nation will know students as achieving "excellence, merit or credit" in a subject. Winning, losing and competition will be ancillary rather than central concepts in the classroom.
Thank goodness, then, for the New Zealand Education and Scholarship Trust, a private organisation of educators, individuals and corporates which has for the past nine years offered schools and students a choice. The trust has just announced the results of its external scholarship-level examinations involving pupils from almost 200 secondary schools. There was a winner: one student who scored higher than the other 1859 contenders. There were marks. There were rankings. But most importantly there was participation and competition for many of the country's most able young people in a demanding test of academic prowess. Tertiary institutions seeking tangible ways of selecting their students in the future must be tempted to adopt such a scheme as their benchmark.
It would be too easy to assume that such an additional independent examination system is the preserve of the privileged. The schools involved were state-run and independent, co-educational and single-sex, rural and urban and fielded boys and girls from Kerikeri to Gore. Some contenders received financial help to sit their papers and this newspaper has for the second year running awarded $3000 scholarships to two of a sizeable number of high achievers with special family or financial needs. The Government, for its part, is able to co-exist with the trust, hosting the national awards ceremony at Parliament this Friday.
But the NCEA rolls on. Those who begin form four next year will be the last to encounter School C and the last to sit Bursary. Many well-intentioned teachers may say Amen to that.
Many others and those in the community worried by this country's general drift into mediocrity will hope the Education and Scholarship Trust and its like can help save us from an equality of underachievement.
<i>Editorial:</i> Drift to mediocrity as exams fade
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